Iran, Russia pour scorn on US at meeting of nuclear watchdog

Iran and Russia are lambasting America’s call for Tehran to adhere to limits in a 2015 nuclear deal with world powers at a special meeting of the UN’s nuclear watchdog.

The meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was requested by the US after it was confirmed last week that Iran had exceeded the stockpile of enriched uranium permitted under the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Earlier the US Ambassador to International Organizations in Vienna Jackie Wolcott told the meeting that Iran was engaged in “nuclear extortion.”

Her Iranian counterpart Kazem Gharib Abadi now says it is a “sad irony that this meeting is convened with the request of the United States.” He says the current impasse is the result of the US’s “outlaw behavior” and condemns what he calls the “sadistic tendency” of the US to impose sanctions on Iran.

Russia’s Ambassador to the IAEA Mikhail Ulyanov tweets after the meeting that the US “was practically isolated on this issue.” He told the assembled diplomats it was an “oddity” that the meeting had been called by the US, “the country that declared the JCPOA to be a ‘terrible deal.'”

— AP